Retrospective Shohei Imamura
23 Oct - 15 Nov 2019

Shôhei Imamura (1926-2006) is one of the few filmmakers, and the only Japanese one, to have won two Palme d'or at the Cannes Film Festival. The first, in 1983, for The Ballad of Narayama, and the second for The Eel, in 1997. An artist who loved to get lost in Tokyo, notorious for its thugs and prostitutes, an unrepentant seducer, he had been revealed to the world in the 1960s with The Insect Woman, or Pigs and Battleships. At this time of international discovery of his cinema, he became friends with Pier Paolo Pasolini.
In 1970, he signed with History of Postwar Japan as Told by a Bar Hostess a masterpiece of documentary film whose commercial failure would ruin him. He took up the initiative again in 1979 with La Vengeance est à moi, considered by some as his masterpiece, and was especially dedicated to La Ballade de Narayama, which won the Palme d'Or, a remake of a Keisuke Kinoshita film from 1958.
Imamura is certainly (with Oshima) the main figure of what has been called "the new Japanese cinema". It is urgent to rediscover his films in Geneva.